The Last Dance
by WarlordFil
Summary: Brooklyn, in his old age, finds himself called by the Phoenix Gate for one last journey...to the end of time itself. Published in the Gathering of the Gargoyles "Phoenix Gate" convention anthology.


_the last dance_

Three hundred and five years was a venerable age for a gargoyle. Brooklyn's years of patrolling the city and guarding its inhabitants were behind him now. All that remained was for him to spend the pre-dawn years of his life living vicariously through his clan—those he had watched over since they had been eggs. He lived in a soft recliner chair, with a blanket covering his legs and his wings wrapped close around him. Hatchlings played at his feet and the adult gargoyles, passing through, always took the time to stop for a word or a chat. A small tray sat on the end table next to him, holding necessary items within easy reach: a glass of water, the holovision remote, a selection of medications, tissues, cookies. As the years went by, the walls of the room grew heavy with the accomplishments of the clan members—books, degrees, artworks, trophies, photographs, mementos without end. They reminded Brooklyn what his presence on this earth had meant not only to himself, or to his clan, but to his species and the human species as well.

Brooklyn had been the Timedancer, sent through the ages to correct the flow of the timestream, to amend the holes in history. And oh, the things he'd seen: princes and pirates, spacemen and samurai, gladiators, boddhisattvas, slaves, tribal chiefs. He had witnessed the wedding of his great-great-great-grandson and rocked his own mother's egg in his arms. Yet in all the times and places he had travelled, there was one thing he had not foreseen—this time he lived in now, when he had become elderly and weak. He had never expected to live over three centuries in age.

The fact was, Brooklyn was tired. The years had taken their toll until simple daily tasks became momentous struggles. He could no longer glide, not since the accident eight years ago where his frail wings had failed him and he had plummetted like Icarus from the sky. While Brooklyn himself had been willing to try again, he had not been willing to put that look of fear back into his great-granddaughter's eyes. He could see, that night in the hospital, how much she had feared to lose him.

And instead he had lost her, in an accident, a horrible and unnecessary accident…but an accident he could forgive. What was harder to accept was the fact that at three hundred and twelve, he had outlived almost everyone else he had awoken with in the year 1994. His travels with the Phoenix Gate had brought him back to 1998 forty years older than his rookery brothers; even so, he had outlived Broadway and Angela. Hudson, Elisa, Goliath, Bronx….long gone, and while Lexington survived, these days Lexington was mostly unaware of anything save the immediate present. And most of all, his beloved mate Katana…fate was cruel, that he had outlived her, though she had reached a great age as well. Even his children were elders now.

Why? Brooklyn asked himself, struggling to rise out of the recliner and failing. Pre-dawn light fell in streamers across the floor. His right hand gripped the cane that supported him when he stood. The others would be outside now, preparing to greet the morning sun. He squirmed again, straining, and finally gave up. Greeting the sun was merely something that would have been nice, but not necessary. It was not worth calling one of the others to come to his aid. He sighed, wishing he had not come to this—a gargoyle too old to even rise to his feet unassisted. A gargoyle too old to fly, too old to protect, too old to be anything but a burden to his clan. A gargoyle cursed to live beyond his own worth, he thought bitterly.

In tenth century Scotland, when a gargoyle grew too weak to contribute to the clan, he would fly out over the ocean alone and never return. Brooklyn remembered his rookery nanny, an ancient female coloured in dusty rose. She oversaw the eggs in the rookery, and could tell each egg apart. Finally, when Brooklyn had attained twenty years, the rookery nanny had come to the decision that she was too old to guard the eggs and hatchlings, as she had since before Hudson's hatching. The clan leader had argued with her, but her mind had been made up. Brooklyn had been the first youngster to note her departure, and he had scampered up to the highest parapets in time to catch a second's glimpse of dusty rose and silver before she had disappeared into the endless waves. Then he had wept. Now, Brooklyn understood her reasons.

Ah, but in this day and age such things were no longer done. He knew that his clan would seek him out and find him, bring him back. He would not even try. He could not cause them that pain.

So Brooklyn sat in his recliner, still holding his cane, old and tired, waiting for dawn. His gaze fell on the end table that had come to mark the right hand perimeter of his tiny little world. Tissues. Entirely too many little pills to keep his heart ticking and his blood circulating and his lungs rising and his mind clear. The remote to that blasted holovision thing that he could never figure out…why had he picked up twentieth century technology so quickly, and yet twenty-third century technology was impossible to decipher? Tasteless cookies. A glass of water. And…a small shield-shaped device in shining gold and blue bearing the intricate outline of a mythic bird, sitting in a tiny ball of etherial fire.

~It's the Gate, it's the damned Phoenix Gate!~

Brooklyn had hoped to never see the thing again. It had disappeared no less than two hundred and thirty seven years ago, leaving him and his mate and his children and their gargoyle beast in 1998 New York. He had thought it destroyed. He had thought himself free.

A wild thought crossed his mind: to take the Gate and speak the incantation, to leave this time and place and never return, like a flash of dusty rose into the sea.

And then another—two great golden eyes. Kitsune, his great-granddaughter's, eyes and the promise he had sworn to her to be careful. Never mind that she was dead. He would not, could not, do such a thing, no matter how he might dream.

But the Timedancer's curse was that the Gate, not he, was the master of time and space. He had only spoken the incantation once, and after that moment, had been prisoner to the Gate's every whim. Brooklyn realized, sickeningly, what was happening as the Gate rose up unbidden, hanging in the air in front of him. He was about to be a prisoner again.

Not here…! Not now…! How could he be Timedancing again, at this age, in these circumstances? Hadn't he given the thing enough of his life already? What had brought the Gate back to him and why now?

The Phoenix Gate flared, shining brighter and brighter to blot out the light of the sun, enveloping Brooklyn in pulses of phoenix fire. It left the ancient gargoyle only a split instant to cry out in astonished fear and rage,

"Does it never end?"

***

The Phoenix Gate deposited him on a crumbling street corner. A bitter wind blew, sending fine grains of sand eddying along the cracked asphalt-like surface. The last of the unearthly flames faded away, and the Gate itself lost its lustre, falling from the air and landing with a clatter in front of him.

How was an elderly gargoyle, too old to walk outdoors unaided, to function in wherever-and-whenever the Gate had chosen to deposit him?

He spread his wings and tail to help keep his balance. Jarringly, he realized that he was leaning on his cane. He had not set it down when the Gate had flared, and so, it had come with him. A mercy. He felt none too steady on his feet right now; without it he might well have fallen. The Gate was right in front of him, but it might as well have been a mile away for all the difficulty involved in picking it up. Gingerly, he lifted the cane, reversed it, and used the hooked end to drag the Phoenix Gate closer. Realizing that the Gate might be his only way home, he carefully wrapped his tail around it and lifted it to a trembling hand.

Leaning on his cane, Brooklyn recited, "Deflegrate muri tempi et intervalia!"

Nothing. The Gate remained lifeless in his hands.

It was like his years of Timedancing all over again, and Brooklyn had long ago moved beyond his initial reactions: disbelief, fear, grief, despair, tentative optimism, and finally a resolution to make the best of the moment while hoping that someday he might be able to return home. Now, after so many years, Brooklyn was able to move immediately into the coping phase. If the Gate could or would not take him back, then he had to figure out his current location in space-time and how best to survive here.

The red gargoyle slipped the lifeless Phoenix Gate into a pouch on his belt. Observing his surroundings more closely, he found himself wishing fervently that the Gate were tame and could take him home on demand.

He stood in the husk of a shattered city. Great buildings, built in an architectural style he did not recognize, pierced the sky with their crumbling towers. They were made of a strange material that appeared synthetic and reflected the small glimmers of light that could be found here and there from luminescent globes scattered amongst the debris. Every building showed signs of damage, many had their walls partially collapsed and here and there one had fallen down entirely. The streets were choked with debris. Yet although the city appeared as a war zone, it also bore the ravages of age. There was a thick coat of dust on everything. Whatever had happened to this city, it had happened long ago.

In the ruins, all directions appeared the same and so Brooklyn chose east at random, limping off down the street. East, the direction where the sun rose in the morning and put an end to the lives of gargoyles for another day.

Brooklyn limped forward until he came to a landfall of rubble closing off the street. A building had collapsed, spilling brickwork and mortar and the remains of furniture across the roadway below. There was a time when Brooklyn would have clambered up the pile with grace and skill, but those days were long gone. He turned into a side street instead, slowly moving forward into an area that had once been a park.

The park was barren, lifeless as a catacomb. No green shoots sprang up amongst the brown and withered grasses; no bird call broke the brooding silence. Trees, devoid of leaves, thrust skeletal limbs towards the lightless sky. A single streetlamp flickered wanly; five similar lamps were dead and helpless to light the dark.

Then, from somewhere off to the left, a flicker of motion and a strangled noise.

Brooklyn reached out to one of the trees for support, sucked in a few breaths and forced himself onwards.

***

She was a gargoyle, or so he presumed by the rich green colour of her skin, the feathered wings on her back and the slim tail…no, tails…that lay tangled around her legs. On second glance, he realized that she had no horns, no knee or elbow spurs, no eye ridges, and no other noticeable gargoyle features. She looked almost human save for the wings, but her eyes shone with an otherworldly brightness. She was clothed in the skins of—no, that fur was not clothing, it was natural fur growing in the shape of clothing, taking on the outline of a halter top and breeches, patterned in a hybrid mix of leopard and giraffe and zebra and chipmunk. The lizard-skin bands around her wrists and lower legs were natural scales, and the feathers in her hair were alive and growing there.

And she was injured, and ill. Her breaths were quick and shallow, rasping in her chest. Dried blood caked her chest and arms; more red fluid, slowly congealing, pooled upon the earth. Her skin was rent in a thousand places by horrible oozing sores. It hurt to simply look at her.

She lay on the ground, sprawled out on a mat of dried grasses, and over her stood a figure caped in black robes, holding a massive scythe.

Brooklyn was old, and weak, and knew he did not stand a chance against an armed foe, but the gargoyle urge to protect was still strong within him. "I won't let you kill her!" Brooklyn blurted, raising his right hand and hooking gnarled talons into claws.

Together, victim and slayer turned to face him. Brooklyn's eyes, glowing a fierce white, gazed defiantly at the black-robed attacker; but somehow, neither of the strangers appeared the least bit disturbed by the presence of a growling gargoyle. The dark figure's cowl utterly obscured its face and any features within; it could have been anyone, or no one, inside. For a brief moment Brooklyn thought he sensed a certain familiarity with the entity's stance, with the way it held its weapon, and then the thought was gone.

The green female, meanwhile, raised her bloodshot eyes and shook her head. "No," she said softly—to Brooklyn, not to the attacker. Her expression was sad. Her voice, when she spoke, sounded like the whisper of the breeze, like the flow of running water, like the sound of sand pouring onto rock.

"What?" Brooklyn stammered.

The dark enigma tilted its hood. "Hello, Timedancer."

Its voice was not the least bit threatening—and also gave Brooklyn the feeling that he'd heard it somewhere before, but he couldn't pin it down. Why couldn't he determine the speaker's age, or sex? Yet…so familiar…Demona? Oberon?

"I'm dying," the female whispered, her gaze fixed on Brooklyn. "It is my time. Please, Timedancer. Do not interfere."

Brooklyn stared at the—how could he describe her? More than a hybrid of gargoyle, human and fae, she also appeared to be some sort of…he searched for a word. _Elemental_. Eyes like water, hair like flame, voice like wind, skin like earth.

"Who are you?" he whispered.

She spoke a single word.

"Gaia."

***

Brooklyn's gaze darted around wildly as the implication of that name hit home. Surely there had to be something left alive here, something somewhere…even a worm, or a dandelion or even a bacteria... Anything that could prove his theory wrong would suffice.

"There is nothing left," the cowled figure spoke, "anywhere on this earth. She has lost all her children, Timedancer, and she is in pain."

"What year is it?" he asked, reluctant and yet obligated to know.

"The final year of Earth," it said, its hollow voice reminding him somehow of Xanatos. Was it smirking under that hood?

"What did this?" Brooklyn demanded. "War? Disease? Attack from space? Is something…else…responsible for this atrocity or did we do it to ourselves?" He drew in a shuddering breath. "Surely this didn't just happen….naturally…."

The cloaked figure shrugged. "Perhaps. It is irrelevant. All things die—some by accident, some by design, some simply by age."

Accident. Kitsune, his great-granddaughter, in Los Angeles when the mighty earthquake hit. While the midday sun beat down, the quake had levelled three quarters of the city and crushed Kitsune in her sleep. Design. Broadway, killed by the 22nd Century Hunter, Ravyn Bluestone-Canmore. Age. His mate…

Brooklyn drew a breath to protest, but Gaia cut him off. "Such is the grand design. This world's time is come. Please, Timedancer." Her eyes were filled with pain; her sores ran down her cheeks like tears.

The cowled being said, strangely gentle, "This is the way of things, Russet Roan."

And Brooklyn staggered backwards, for only his rookery nanny had ever called him Russet Roan.

He stumbled, almost losing his footing, and caught himself by leaning heavily on his cane. The Timedancer bowed his head, uncertain if he was even physically capable of stopping that mighty scythe in its descent, and doubly uncertain that he was really doing the right thing by standing and watching.

She gave no cry. There was a solid thunk, and when Brooklyn looked up the cloaked figure had already stepped forward to hide the body from his view; only the thin, still tails gave testimony to the passing of a world.

***

Brooklyn was not certain if what he had seen had been dream, reality, or a combination of the two. Perhaps he had merely perceived catastrophic events in terms he could understand, for surely they could not be literal: Gaia, soul of Earth, and Death, the reaper's scythe. But when the dark reaver had stepped forward, offering a grey-gloved hand to Brooklyn, the red gargoyle had reached out and accepted it.

There was nothing else to be done, really. If his experience had been accurate, than the planet Earth was utterly dead, right down to the soul of the planet itself.

They rose through space, with a sensation less like flying and more like floating. Brooklyn kept expecting his ears to pop, or to feel the strange pressurized sensation one could achieve by pulling up abruptly while flying. Instead, he felt an eerie lightness, a detachment from the universe around him. Without a spaceship, without a spell, with no protective bubble, Brooklyn and his charcoal cloaked companion rose away from the dead Earth, floating away until even the solar system had shrunk to the size of a pea—and all about them danced other worlds, countless other galaxies, an infinity of planets all circling their own little stars.

"Is there no legacy?" Brooklyn demanded, his voice hoarse. "I've been to the future. I saw cities on Mars, rode the trade routes to Ritaxa, flew through the Tesseract Bridge to a parallel reality. Surely there is life elsewhere than Earth!"

The figure nodded gravely. "Earth died, but at this point Mars survives. The Ritaxan region is rich in life. Parallel universes proceed on their own course. But this universe—all universes—are organisms, with finite life cycles. They are born. They grow. They decay…and die. The heat death of the universe continues apace." Did he know that voice…Titania?

The figure raised a hand and pointed out towards the farthest reaches of the universe. Brooklyn squinted, trying to coax clear vision out of his tired eyes. He could see a spray of stars like a wave of light, scattered across the void. His vision flickered, dimmed, and he squinted harder. Was it his imagination, or was the glow from the river of stars lessening somehow? Darker…slowly darker… He fixed his gaze on a single star and stared at it. It shone back at him, the same, still the same…until its glow flickered, grew faint and suddenly collapsed in on itself.

"What's happening?"

"The universe is coming to an end, Brooklyn," the scythebearer replied in Elisa Maza's voice.

"But….Ritaxa…Mars…."

"There is no life without light, Brooklyn." Why did the being now remind him of a sneering Sevarius? "As the hydrogen in the universe is consumed and turned to helium, the entire universal system runs out of fuel. There is no more power to fire the nuclear reactions and light the stars. There are no more suns to produce the rays that nourish living things. The universe slowly runs out of steam…"

"…not with a bang, but a whimper." And now he sounded like Goliath, quoting from some leather-bound book.

"That's not right," Brooklyn said quietly, and as he said the words he thought about a universe growing old, and tired, and exhausted. Light and heat slipped away like water through fingers, plunging starving planets into despair. A realm slowly faltering, fading away, star by star, into oblivion; cold husks of burned-out suns were left behind like ruins, hanging helpless in a black abyss. The Timedancer beheld a universe fading away into useless age, just like Brooklyn himself. Not fair. Not right. And not to be endured. "That's not RIGHT!" Brooklyn screamed, with rage he did not realize he could still feel, and with a power he had not experienced in untold years.

"Why?" the hooded being asked, "would you prefer it to end with a bang? Lights, fire, catastrophe? I can do that if you wish it." His sepulcheral words fell like stones into the vaccuum.

"Anubis?" Brooklyn whispered, but the being had extended its attention to the lightless, motionless universe around it, and reached out its left hand in a ceremonial gesture. It extended a flat hand, splayed its fingers, and deliberately started to curl its fingers in towards its palm.

The celestial spheres responded… The matter in the universe sucked inwards towards the centre, moons crashing together, stars ripping apart. Planets shattered. Rock and earth and dead organic matter was compressed into one ball of mass, compacted by the repeated striking of one body against another. The burned-out stars were stripped from the firmament, pulled into the mighty drawing core. Brooklyn watched the universe implode, and marvelled at the fact that he himself felt no pull at all. It was as if he stood outside of both time and space.

Briefly, Brooklyn dared to look into the eyes of oblivion—the utter absence that remained when all matter had gathered into the centre. To see so much absolute nothing hurt both his eyes and his mind. He could not bear to look upon the unspeakable abyss, and instead returned his gaze to the sight of all the matter that remained squeezing itself into the shape of a planet—the shape of a massive orb—the shape of a basketball—the shape of a pea—down and down into an infantismally tiny speck that contained the atoms of a now-dead universe.

Something strange had happened and Brooklyn was hardly aware of it. He could still sense the presence of his companion, beside him and around him, but he could not see the cloaked figure before him. All he could see was that tiny ball floating in the void, that infentismally small sphere holding all the matter there had ever been, a marble in the heart of absence. His companion spoke and Brooklyn heard the words within his own head.

"It has ceased to move. It is nothing. All the matter in the universe has come to this, degenerated into absolute zero. There is nothing, truly nothing, left."

How could that being speak so evenly, to dare describe this utter annihilation so reasonably, so calmly! Brooklyn wished to all gods that might be, that they might send him a hero to fight the dying of the light and bring back life. But they did not. He could not say how long he floated there in the endless void with the figure's grey cloak fluttering around him and the minute sphere that had once been a universe suspended before him.

To remain here was hopeless, and to accept it, madness. Any sane being had to fight this extinction as long as life remained within him. In the absence of a hero, Brooklyn would have to rise to the occasion one last time. Never mind that he was old, and tired, and too weak to stand without his cane. Accepting this destruction was not a choice.

Brooklyn clutched the Gate in his left hand and muttered, "_Deflagrate muri tempi et intervalia._"

Nothing happened.

The figure's voice came echoing from an unknown source. "It won't work, you know."

"Why…why not?" Brooklyn demanded, though he feared the other was correct.

"Burn through walls of space and time. A brave command, but one which presupposes the existence of two things." It paused, as if expecting Brooklyn to answer.

"The existence of space. And of time," Brooklyn answered begrudgingly.

"Yes. We are now outside of time," it said patiently, with his great-granddaughter's endless calm. How often had she explained to him the mystifying steps involved in turning on the holovision projector? Why could he imagine her now explaining the end of time?

Kitsune's memory faded as the Phoenix Gate shifted beneath his fingers. The emotion that leapt to his mind was not hope, but fear. In forty years of Timedancing he had never felt that sensation from the Gate. Brooklyn looked down, and gasped. A fracture ran down the surface of the Gate, deepening, sending out smaller, finer hairline cracks. A chunk crumbled out of the left side, then another. Brooklyn tried to hold the Gate together in talons made clumsy and slow with age. The blue surface of the Gate sloughed away. Another piece tumbled into the void. He squeezed it tighter and the pieces ground into powder, wafting away from his desperate hand. Brooklyn cupped his hands together, catching the fragments as the Gate degenerated into sand, which poured inexorably through his fingers until all that was left was a fine coat of dust on his hands.

"Timedancer," the voice said, "no longer dancing now that Time is done."

"So what now?" Brooklyn cried, his voice filled with rage and despair caused by years of frustrating confinement. "I'm old and tired and trapped forever at the End of Time, doomed to never die—and never live again?"

"If that is your choice," the figure replied. It turned away from him slightly; he sensed the gesture rather than saw it. His vision was fuzzy, distorted, as if he saw through multiple superimposed eyes.

The words were heartbreaking, for he—she—it…spoke in Katana's voice. And the gesture…he was overwhelmed with impatience, frustration, anger and sorrow. What else was there for him to choose? There was nothing here—no one, nothing, not even movement: only the tiny ball that had once been a universe, hanging helplessly in the vaccuum. It didn't even rotate, didn't even budge so much as a hair. It was utterly dependent on someone else to put life into the system, to renew and reinvigorate, to bring it back into motion, to…

Brooklyn felt a sudden curious impulse. Reaching out his right hand to the Orb, he asked, "What happens if I gave it a flick?"

~Try it and see.~

And he could not have said if the reply came from the stranger or within.

Brooklyn pulled the white cloak close around him with his left hand while his right extended its index talon, and ever so lightly tapped the ball that was once a universe.

And life exploded.

A single motion, a talon-tip to start motion in the atoms, to create vibrations and move matter from absolute zero back into a building crescendo that birthed galaxies, created worlds, lit suns and spun stars across the firmament. Cells and circuits formed, life of a hundred kinds arose, animal, plant, spirit—some which resembled the beings Brooklyn had known, some of which were utterly unlike anything he could ever have imagined, but all of which lived, all of which came into being and grew and learned and changed and died…and rearranged and rose again. Life surrounded him like a symphony, budding and blooming in countless varied abundance, fountaining forth new possibilities.

~Timedancer: welcome to the Beginning of Time.~

Glittering in the void, a dance of starlight coalesced into a small shield-shaped device, green with silver gilding, depicting a bat-winged creature with a sparkling sapphire eye. It hovered there, flashing, and then—in a tsunami of preturnatural water—was washed away into the timestream, where it would dance for the duration of this universe.

And Brooklyn—who was also Azrael, and Anubis and the Rookery Nanny and Goliath and Katana and Elisa and Kitsune and Bronx and Broadway and Demona and Titania and everyone else who had ever been, or ever would be—lifted his scythe-turned-staff to the limitless universe and brought forth Soul in the new creation, laughing, for he had realized at last—it never ends!


End file.
